Why do college students have to continue to pay back their loans when the legislature is bipartisanly comfortable writing off $50k+ PPP day loans per business from Covid Pandemic? [0]
One is based on reason, where people look for contradictions (like you're doing right now) in order to better understand truth.
The other is based on authority or faith, where people look to authority figures, such as parents, priests, pundits, or politicians, in order to understand "truth".
These are incompatible. You can't point out contradictions to an authority oriented person and expect them to care. While you are using your words, they have already made off with the money. Your reason got you nowhere, while their power got them $50k+ loans. They could do what they did with action while you are soothing yourself with words.
One thing authority oriented people understand is that actions matter most and that the highest truth is found within action on the physical world.
I guess it doesn't help me solve it, but baby steps.
One group looks to the abstract to try and make inferences. The other group looks to behavior to try and discern patterns.
To me, the first group seems overwhelmingly naive. It assumes that groups of people all act according to a unified principle across time and space.
The second group understands that behavior is circumstantial, based on the changing people and incentives involved. Government is not an ideologically uniform monolith.
I don't agree with this, since people who hold this belief generally ignore second order effects and are immune to hypocrisy/contradiction based arguments. Without respect of contradictions, there is no basis for truth only for feelings and actions, which I think I would call "genetic truth."
Clearly this group is evolutionary conserved, and there must be some truth to that ideology for that to be true.
The first group has to deal with the Karl Popper's paradox of tolerance, which is the rigorous description of what you just said. It requires constant maintenance and adjustment against selfishness and decay, it requires enforcement of universalized principles (assimilation of specific ideas).
The second group must deal with having beliefs that directly contradict reality and freedom and reality asserting itself.
Both groups have different fundamental strategies for the prisoner's dilemma and different failure modes for their strategy.
The first group says there is one theoretically correct strategy, to always trust/cooperate because from a mathematical perspective, under conditions of abundance and an assumption of universality, that is provably the correct strategy.
The second says that if you can win by defecting, you should.
The first group fails when they fail to defect in response to people defecting against them. The paradox of intolerance can be restated in prisoner's dilemma terms: if you think cooperation is always right, then how do you justify defection?
The second group fails by failing to get out of zero sum thinking. They can never be greater than the sum of their parts, they also generally create a ruggedly darwinistic society you wouldn't want to be a part of.
What Trump has done is make his followers feel they are the brand. They are MAGA. That means it doesn't matter what system of truth you adhere to, because you will always go with your identity, which is MAGA.
Yes, this is exactly how cults work.
As the authority figure deviates further and further from reality, it makes them increasingly hostile to those who reason, but it also creates a cost to acknowledging reality. The cultists would have to acknowledge they were suckered or otherwise deficient. All those contradictions that were ignored protect their alternative reality because they represent pain that must be overcome. Without being willing to face the pain of being wrong and all those you have harmed through being wrong, you must stay in your alternative reality.
https://www.npr.org/2020/03/26/821457551/whats-inside-the-se...
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/26/business/coronavirus-stim...
https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/small-businesses-face-nightm...
The deal was “if a business spends a percentage this money on payroll, it will be forgive”. It was designed to keep businesses afloat for a set amount of time as we locked down for COVID.
That's a good to society as well. Arguably one with likely better payoff given that a lot more college graduates succeed in getting a degree than businesses succeeded in paying their PPP loans.
If a business fails we have no problem bailing them out. It isn't the businesses fault. It's the current economic situation.
If an individual fails then they made mistakes and failed to pull themselves up by their bootstraps.
I'm being a bit hyperbolic but really, America loves corporate welfare.
Look at the south: they'll sell themselves down the river for 20 oil refinery jobs but the second someone needs food stamps they're a loser.
A lil bit of it is also the "not yet a millionaire" mentality that a lot of Americans have. They believe that one day they'll also be rich so we shouldn't punish the rich, it may be them one day.
More the case that America is run (directly or indirectly) by the ultra-rich and they designed a system that works for them and sucks for everyone else.